CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Belcea Quartet

Zankel Hall
Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Belcea Quartet
·· Corina Belcea-Fisher, Violin
·· Laura Samuel, Violin
·· Krzysztof Chorzelski, Viola
·· Antoine Lederlin, Cello

HAYDN Quartet in D Major, Op. 20, No. 4
BARTÓK String Quartet No. 3

SCHUBERT String Quartet in D Minor, D.810, "Death and the Maiden"

This concert is generously supported by the A.L. and Jennie L. Luria Foundation.

Program Notes:

By Harry Haskell

JOSEPH HAYDN String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 64, No. 6
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria; died May 31, 1809, in Vienna.

Composed in 1772, Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 16, 1958, at Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) with the Fine Arts Quartet: Leonard Sorkin and Abram Loft, violins; Irving Ilmer, viola; and George Sopkin, cello.

It is difficult to conceive today how startling, even revolutionary, Haydn’s six Op. 20 quartets must have sounded to audiences in the early 1770s. Haydn’s earlier essays in the genre had differentiated the string quartet from the instrumental divertimenti, sinfonias, quartet sonatas, and similar chamber works characteristic of the lightweight rococo style. But the idea of an ensemble in which four equal-voiced instruments were woven into a seamless unit, while still retaining their individuality, had yet to catch on among either composers or the conservative musical public.

The stylistic breakthrough that Haydn achieved in 1772, the year of his 40th birthday, is illustrated by the astonishing finale of the D-Major Quartet. Here, caution and convention are thrown to the winds. The Presto scherzando whizzes by at a breakneck speed that masks the wealth of invention it contains. Haydn tosses off one idea after another, like a juggler seeing how many balls he can keep in the air at once. He employs every means at his disposal—melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics—to hold players and listeners alike on the edge of their seats. The movement is a continual tour de force, but instead of capping it off with a flourish, Haydn bows out with a wry wink of the eye.

The dash of “gypsy” music that spices the quartet’s finale and, especially, the rollicking minuet reminds us that Haydn had the good fortune to serve as Kapellmeister at the Esterházy estate in Hungary, a sinecure that afforded him both the musical resources and artistic freedom to carry out his bold stylistic experiments. The first two movements of the D-Major Quartet are no less venturesome. After a quietly expansive opening, the Allegro di molto erupts in boisterous high spirits. Thematic material is volleyed from one instrument to another as the music explores a wide swath of harmonic territory. The theme-and-variations format of the slow movement gives each player a star turn, climaxing in a coda of exceptional delicacy and pathos.

BÉLA BARTÓK String Quartet No. 3
Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania; died September 26, 1945, in New York City.

Composed in 1927, the Quartet No. 3 was first performed in Philadelphia on Dec. 30, 1928. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere on October 24, 1963, at Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) with the Philadelphia String Quartet: Veda Reynolds and Irwin Eisenberg, violins; Alan Iglitzin, viola; and Charles Brennand, cello.

Bartók’s six string quartets, composed between 1909 and 1939, have achieved the canonic status of modern classics. As such, they have been subjected to microscopic analysis touching on every aspect of Bartók’s musical language, from the finest points of pitch structure to large-scale formal organization. For the average listener, however, the most immediately striking feature of Bartók’s highly distinctive sound world may well be his prodigious inventiveness in the rhythmic sphere and the captivating sonorities he coaxes from the string instruments.

Bartók’s fondness for special tonal effects—swooping glissandos, ghostly muted passages, screeching tremolos played with the bow almost on top of the bridge—is much in evidence in the short but substantial Third Quartet of 1927. (Bartók had recently heard Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite and fallen under the spell of its richly coloristic atmosphere.) Indeed, these effects are so deeply embedded in Bartók’s idiom as to be intrinsic to its very meaning and expressive power. The same might be said of the gestural quality that gives Bartók’s music so much of its irrepressible kinetic vitality.

It is to these elements of timbre, texture, rhythm, and gesture, rather than to any conventional formal design, that the Third Quartet owes its concentrated intensity and cohesiveness. Although its single movement flies by at a helter-skelter pace that makes it all but impossible to take in much of its detail on a single hearing, Bartók makes things somewhat easier for the listener by providing signposts in the form of clearly defined sections, transitions, repetitions, and tonal references. With a little effort, and a willing ear, it is not too difficult to penetrate through the work’s bristling chromatic surface to the somber lyricism at its core.


FRANZ SCHUBERT String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”
Born January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died there November 19, 1828.

Composed in March 1824, the Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, was first performed at a private house concert in Vienna on February 1, 1826. It received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on December 6, 1891, with the New York Symphony String Quartet: Adolph Brodsky and Jules Conus, violins; Jan Koert, viola; and Anton Hekking, cello.

“Give me your hand,” says Death to the frightened girl. “I am not rough. You shall sleep gently in my arms.” Whether intimations of his own mortality inspired Schubert to base the slow movement of his next-to-last string quartet on his song “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” written seven years earlier, is a matter for conjecture. Yet there is no mistaking the morbid sense of doom and impending loss that suffuses the score. And it is surely no accident that all four movements, unusually for Schubert and his contemporaries, are in the minor mode.

The opening Allegro, with its explosive outbursts and typically Schubertian major-minor instability, sets the tone for the entire quartet. Insistent, propulsive rhythms give the movement an air of grim inexorability. (It’s worth noting that it is the rhythmic character of Schubert’s themes, rather than their melodic contours or harmonic settings, that impresses itself most clearly on the listener’s memory.) The movement culminates in one of Schubert’s most vividly dramatic codas, first building to a frenzied climax, then fading into silence.

The veiled, chorale-like opening of the Andante con moto—borrowed from the piano accompaniment of Schubert’s song—picks up where the Allegro left off. Formally, the slow movement is a set of variations, as richly imaginative as any Schubert ever wrote. But even without the programmatic connection, it would be tempting to hear a dance of death in the first violin’s increasingly angular gestures and acrobatic leaps. By the same token, the tug-of-war between first violin and cello in the third variation suggests the maiden’s frantic struggle with the Grim Reaper. And what does the movement’s epic journey from G minor to G major signify if not a passage from fear to acceptance?

The savage intensity of the Scherzo, with its lacerating cross-accents, is tempered by the D-major radiance of the middle-section trio. Listen for the dotted rhythmic motif that runs through the entire movement; in a slightly elongated form, it recurs in the main theme of the Presto—one of many subliminal threads that bind this mighty musical canvas together. After its initial headlong gallop, the finale proceeds by fits and starts. Often the music seems to wander off on a tangent, only to pick itself up and plunge forward again. Then, just as one feels the four players have exhausted their energy, they make one last prestissimo sprint to the finish line.


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Harry Haskell is the editor of The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism (Princeton University Press) and the author of The Early Music Revival: A History (Dover).

Belcea Quartet
·· Corina Belcea-Fisher, Violin
·· Laura Samuel, Violin
·· Krzysztof Chorzelski, Viola
·· Antoine Lederlin, Cello
Established while its members were studying at the Royal College of Music in 1994, the Belcea Quartet has quickly gained a reputation as one of the world’s leading chamber ensembles. The group represented Great Britain in the ECHO Rising Stars series and was selected for the BBC Radio 3 New Generations scheme from 1999 to 2001. They won first prizes at both the Osaka and Bordeaux International string quartet competitions in 1999, and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Chamber Music Award in both in 2001 and 2003. Since September 2006 the members of the quartet have held teaching positions at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where the Belcea Quartet is the Associate Ensemble.

In 2001 the quartet began an exclusive recording contract with EMI and won the Gramophone Award for the Best Debut Recording. Subsequent recordings for EMI include Schubert’s string quartets and “Trout” Quintet with Thomas Adès and Corin Long; Brahms’s String Quartet Op. 51, No. 1, and his Second String Quintet with Thomas Kakuska; Fauré’s La bonne chanson with Ian Bostridge; a double disc of Britten’s string quartets; and most recently Mozart’s “Dissonance” and “Hoffmeister” quartets. The group’s future releases include the complete Bartók quartets.

The Belcea Quartet has performed in such prestigious venues as Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Brussels’s Palais des Beaux Arts, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and the Théâtre du Châtelet Paris, as well as at festivals including Luberon, Istanbul, Trondheim, Lausanne, Salzburg, and the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade. In the UK the quartet regularly appears at the Bath, Petworth, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh, Perth, and Edinburgh festivals, and at Wigmore Hall, where the ensemble was the Quartet-in-Residence from 2001 to 2006. The Belcea Quartet regularly works with leading instrumentalists including Thomas Adès, Isabelle van Keulen, Michael Collins, Imogen Cooper, Piotr Anderszewski, Valentin Erbin, Natalie Clein, and Yovan Markovitch, and singers including Angelika Kirschslager, Ian Bostridge, Simon Keenlyside, Lisa Milne, and Ann Sofie von Otter.